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Steve Troughton-Smith has far more experience with Mac Catalyst than most people outside of Apple, so when he talks about this stuff, it’s good to pay attention:

I wanted to take some time to lay out the areas of the framework that I’ve found just don’t do enough to enable great Mac apps, and perhaps provide a checklist of things for Apple to solve in future versions of the OS. This is my curated list, and there will definitely be things I didn’t touch upon below as they haven’t directly impacted what I’m working on or hoping to build. Onwards!

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Apple Support:

If you reinstall a localized version of Mac OS X on an iMac G5, Mac mini, or iBook G4, you may need to reinstall AppleWorks separately.

For more information on installing the additional applications that came with your computer, see the document called “Read Before You Install,” located on the Mac OS X Install Disc 1.

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Editor’s Note: This column was originally published in System Extension, the newsletter sent to 512 Pixels members. Learn more about the 512 membership here.

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Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the iMac G4. Two decades after its introduction, this machine is still a favorite of many, many Mac fans.

I was in high school in 2002 when the iMac G4 was introduced, and really getting into the Mac for the first time, thanks to my time at the student newspaper.

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Automation on the Mac is alive and well and FastScripts 3 from Red Sweater makes it easy to organize and run your favorite scripts.

With FastScripts you can set up powerful keyboard shortcuts to run your scripts, or select and run your scripts from a menu bar icon. The app supports AppleScript, Automator, and shell scripts including Ruby, Python, or anything else you can cook up! Version 3 is a major upgrade that brings powerful new features supporting parallel script execution, a streamlined in-menu search function, and progress reporting.

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Mark Gurman, writing at Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. is bumping the pay of many U.S. retail employees in the face of a tightening tightening labor market, inflation woes and complaints from some staffers about working conditions during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The raises, which have ranged from 2% to 10% depending on store location and role, are going to salespeople, Genius Bar technical support staff and some senior hourly workers, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. The increases don’t apply to all employees, and not all stores have been notified of the changes yet.

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My thanks to the folks behind Coherence X4 for sponsoring the site this week. Coherence X4 allows you to turn any website into a chromium-powered app on your Mac. Simply pick a site, enter a name, and pick an icon, and Coherence will turn the app into an isolated application separate from your main browser. Readers get 20% off this week when you purchase Coherence X4 or when you use the promo code 512Pixels at checkout.

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Alise Fisher, writing on the JWST blog:

The James Webb Space Telescope is nearing completion of the first phase of the months-long process of aligning the observatory’s primary mirror using the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.

The team’s challenge was twofold: confirm that NIRCam was ready to collect light from celestial objects, and then identify starlight from the same star in each of the 18 primary mirror segments. The result is an image mosaic of 18 randomly organized dots of starlight, the product of Webb’s unaligned mirror segments all reflecting light from the same star back at Webb’s secondary mirror and into NIRCam’s detectors.

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Apple’s AirTags have been at the center of numerous stories of unwanted tracking over the last year, making a statement like this feel inevitable:

We’ve become aware that individuals can receive unwanted tracking alerts for benign reasons, such as when borrowing someone’s keys with an AirTag attached, or when traveling in a car with a family member’s AirPods left inside. We also have seen reports of bad actors attempting to misuse AirTag for malicious or criminal purposes.

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This week on Connected:

After talking about pen podcasts and the biting lip emoji, Federico, Myke and Stephen give each other a tour of their smart home setups.

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Apple Support:

Nokia N70 phones have a “Mark as not done” option for To Do items. If the “Mark as not done” phone option is used on a synced iCal To Do item whose status is “completed,” the status will not change in iCal.

Apple’s solution was … less than helpful:

Change the “completed” status of To Do items in iCal instead of on the phone.

Information about products not manufactured by Apple is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute Apple’s recommendation or endorsement. Please contact the vendor for additional information.

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It’s always fun to part in this, and to read what others in the field think about Apple’s previous year.

Update: Don’t miss the follow-up post with charts!

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Coherence X4 allows you to turn any website into a chromium-powered app on your Mac. Simply pick a site, enter a name, and pick an icon, and Coherence will turn the app into an isolated application separate from your main browser.

Unlike resource hogging Electron apps, Coherence apps are fully powered and completely customizable. You can use the vast majority of Chrome extensions, customize app assets, and even use features like whitelisting to turn websites like Gmail into an email client that will bump links to your default browser.

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